The surprising cultural life of orcas

Male killer whales are all mamas’ boys. That’s not a revelation; their curious and intense social lives have been studied for decades, but the extent to which a male orca depends on his mother has been revealed by new research, which shows that mothers routinely sacrifice their food and their energies for their enormous male offspring, compromising their own health and their ability to produce more young.

Orcas, or killer whales — the former name is used more often these days — are not whales but big dolphins, up to twenty-six feet long. They’re fierce enough under any name, but curiously selective in their ferocity. And that’s all about culture.

Not ours: theirs. The cultural life of orcas is a subject of scientific debate, and its implications are extensive. The idea that only humans have culture — that culture defines the separation of humanity from everything else that lives — is long since exploded and orcas have helped greatly with the exploding.

The orcas of the northwest Pacific are divided into three distinct populations, and the differences among them are not physiological but cultural. The differences show in how and what they hunt. There are the “offshores,” who specialize in deep-sea fish; there are the “residents,” who prefer salmon and other coastal fish; and there are the “transients,” who specialize in hunting marine mammals — seals and whales, up to and including the blue whale.

These different populations are called ecotypes and they don’t mix. (There are perhaps five different ecotypes in the Antarctic.) All orcas have the equipment to feed on each other’s preferred food, but they don’t even try. They stick to their own tastes and their own kind. They are very picky about it — captive animals of one ecotype have been known to refuse unfamiliar food to the point of starvation.

They are also xenophobic. They live in very tight matrilineal groups and, most unusually, all the young stay with the maternal group for the rest of their lives. Females become relatively independent of their mothers and meet their own feeding needs, but males don’t. Individuals leave the group for short periods to mate outside it.

Orcas are deeply loyal to others of their group and they go to considerable lengths to avoid groups of a different ecotype. Each group upholds both its separateness and its identity with its own range of distinct sounds. This sense of community and shared purpose help them operate as brilliantly effective cooperative hunters.

Orcas are gaudy animals. Sharks are just as fast and just as well-armed, and they are colored in ways that keep them relatively hidden even in open water, but orcas, with their dramatic black and white patterns, stand out at a distance. It’s been speculated that their lives are like soccer players’: they gain more from being able to keep tabs on their colleagues — teammates — than they would from being hidden.

Orcas make us ask troubling questions, not about them but about humanity. The self-sacrificing mother is one such conundrum; their cultural life is another and bigger one. Orcas are more remarkable than people ever thought when writing them off as “killers,” but why should we be surprised? All we have to do is read Darwin: “The difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind.”

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s April 2023 World edition.